Having followed this thread with some interest, I have an opinion at this point.
The Jargon folks are some of the pioneers, no question. They are current industry leaders and definitely influential – I do enjoy and have used the open source dev model before.
But I think the bigger issue is what black hat people people represent. In this particular case (our industry), it is the theft of content and abuse of certain loopholes. Greek, I agree that this will be looked at more severely in the coming months – possibly shut down, but I don’t know enough about what has to happen to comment on that. Si, I believe that you have some valid points with your, “let’s not lose sight of the fact that we are all after traffic and eventually a buck” mentality. I can see where the disconnect is and why the disagreement started.
I actually want to remind people that at the end of the day, the black hatters (if or when they get shut down) will be replaced with the next generation of guerilla computer types – it is the natural instinct of people like this to look for challenges in terms of their skills, finding loopholes, bucking the system. That is, in fact, what caused the jargon folks to get their momentum.
In our business, there’s a ton of money to be made, with relative ease. I am not saying we don’t work hard, but the returns are huge. People who apply their hacking skills to the problems will generally reflect the evil side of things. The fact that there exists so much money is the reason some people are attracted to the challenge in the first place. It’s kinda like the argument I have heard for scamming insurance – someone’s gonna do it, and there’s money there anyhow …..
I, personally, see a difference in the levels of grey discussed here. There are loopholes that don’t damage individuals here and there are direct attacks on people’s livelihoods.
I am not supporting anything remotely black, or even dark grey, it’s just that I find it interesting that we are concentrating so hard on this generation of evil hacker types when the next group will be just as annoying, damaging and infuriating. I think we just persevere and keep rolling along until the next headache :banger:
That’s my 0.02